Mr. Tall (5 page)

Luckily, the barn was behind the house and Charlie returned through the back door with a handful of eggs from the chicken coop and set to building a fire in the stove. They would eventually come to laugh about her rude introduction to farm life, and “putting up the mule” even became their euphemism for sex, but Plutina would find nothing funny about the episode for some time to come. In fact, from that day on she counted each of the succession of mules Charlie would own a personal enemy. (During the summers he did spend more waking hours with them than he did with her.) She listened to Charlie banging around in the kitchen for a few minutes before deciding to join him. I'm only going, she told herself, because that's where the fire is.

Plutina awoke early the next morning, before first light, and one by one considered the surprises of the night before. Her nightgown was still pushed above her waist, and Charlie was spooned up against her, which didn't feel that different than Henrietta being spooned up against her, except that she, Plutina, didn't have on any underwear and Charlie was naked as the day he was born and clutching one of her breasts like it was something that would blow up if he dropped it. She moved around slightly, trying to locate and gauge the condition of Charlie's “thing” without waking it up. (She didn't know what else to call it without cussing. He had not referred to it by name. She had once heard her father use the word “tallywhacker,” but that sounded like a piece of farm machinery that would chop off your fingers if you got too close to it.) When “interested” (that was Charlie's word for the way it got, “interested,” as if it had a mind of its own), Charlie's thing had about the same girth as a good stick, the kind you might pick up in the woods if you needed to kill a copperhead, and was longer, she thought, than was absolutely necessary. He had insisted on prodding her with it the whole time it was “interested,” and not just in the place she had expected him to prod her with it, but wherever it happened to be aimed. She had found the constant poking irritating (how would you like it if somebody spent half the night jabbing you with a stick?) but when she tried to move her leg or whatever it was butting up against out of the way, or got mad and pushed against it with her hip, trying to drive it back to its side of the bed, Charlie only took that as encouragement and redoubled the poking and jabbing. (If his thing made him that crazy every time it inflated, what in the world had he done with it before he got married?) She wiggled again. Charlie, in his sleep, shoved his thing up against the back of her thigh, except now it was as harmless and squishy—and very nearly as disgusting—as the chawed-up plug of tobacco Henrietta had years ago double-dared her to step on with one of her bare feet.

The sheets, she figured, and probably her best nightgown, had to be a sight. If it hadn't snowed she was going to find out first light where Charlie kept the washtub, then build a fire and give everything a good scrubbing. (She could only hope they hadn't gotten any blood on the quilts; blood was nearly impossible to get out of a quilt.) As for the sex itself, well, that had hurt worse than she had thought it would—which was saying something, because after Plutina started going out with Charlie Shires, Henrietta had been explicit in her speculation about the pain girls experienced when they lost their virginity. It's like getting shot with a gun. It's like being crucified. It's like getting branded. Henrietta had only been trying to scare her, of course, but her speculations hadn't been that far off the mark. On first consideration, Plutina's “female place” seemed a receptacle entirely ill-suited for its apparently God-ordained purpose. No, Henrietta, it's more like sticking an ax handle in a pencil sharpener. Nor did she like the sound of “female place,” even though it had been her mother's term of choice, because it sounded like some fenced-off spot where girls were sent to be punished. Now that the gate was open she needed a new word. “Vagina” sounded nasty and all the other words she knew for it were vulgarities.

Still, awful as the sex had been, she sensed glimmering off in the distance the faint possibility that she might somehow be able to find pleasure of her own in it. The thought troubled her a little. The “loose” girls Plutina had gone to school with—there had been three for sure, maybe four—had been rumored to like doing it and she, or any other respectable girl, wouldn't have been caught dead talking to any of them. Was liking sex the thing that had made those girls bad? She supposed that letting Charlie do it a reasonable amount was part of being a good wife—Plutina meant to be a good wife and besides, it was the only way to make babies—but did liking it turn you into something else? Did it diminish you? Would it cause you to lose favor in the eyes of your husband? Of God? The people you passed on the street? Could you be a faithful, Christian wife and still be loose? Plutina had no idea. She had occasionally sneaked and read parts of Song of Solomon when she was supposed to be memorizing Bible verses for Sunday school, but she hadn't been able to make heads or tails out of it, all that talk about young stags and mountains and spices and pomegranates. (What was a pomegranate, anyway?) She suspected the book was about sex, but there wasn't anybody she could ask. Because of her mother's stroke Plutina had never found out just what, if anything, Mrs. Scroggs would have had to say; the one time she had shown a passage to Henrietta, Henrietta had slapped her face and run into their room and slammed the door.

That afternoon, Plutina sat wrapped up on the back steps and watched Charlie chop wood. He grew so warm with the labor that he took off his coat, then his shirt, before finally wiggling out of the top part of his union suit and letting it dangle down behind him as he worked. His bare skin steamed in the cold. Despite the lingering soreness, Plutina began to feel warm and blurry down there. (Down there. She hated that, too. It made her private parts sound like South Carolina.) When Charlie glanced over at her she blushed so exorbitantly that he grinned. She couldn't look at him just then so she picked at a loose thread on one of her coat buttons until she almost worked the button off the coat. She could feel him watching her. Her nipples puckered up the way they did when she ate a pickle. Female place. Down there. Vagina. South Carolina. She twisted impatiently on the step. Now she knew why babies got mad and cried when they wanted to tell you something. They didn't know the right words. Charlie drove the ax into the chopping block. The echo clapping off the mountainside made her jump.

“What's the matter with you?” he asked.

“Nothing's the matter with me.”

“Well, you look like something's the matter with you.”

“Well, there ain't.” She finally forced herself to glance up at him. Tallywhacker, she thought. Dick. Peter. Charlie. “It's cold out here,” she said. “You interested in going inside?”

In the spring of 1935 Charlie took a job working on the new road through the Smokies. They had eaten well enough in the intervening years but made only enough money farming to cover the fertilizer bills. Charlie left home Sunday afternoons after dinner and walked over the mountains to the work camp near Corpening. He walked back home Fridays after he got off, arriving at the farm by 2
AM
. (How he made the trip through the dark without a lantern was a mystery to her.) Plutina would have preferred to stay with her family in Weald while Charlie was gone, but the farm work fell to her. That spring and early summer she not only kept up her vegetable garden, but she also fed the animals and hoed and fertilized the cotton and the corn and the watermelons. Most days she had to work from can to can't just to stay close to even with all she had to do. The work seemed to her a hateful thing she chased but never once caught. She just tried to keep it in sight, and in the process developed the mannish calluses of a field hand. (Charlie did the cultivating when he came home on weekends. Sometimes he had to work Sunday mornings to get it all done.) Plutina took Friday afternoons off to straighten up the house so it would be clean when Charlie got home. Before she went to bed she drew enough water from the well to fill the washtub. When Charlie stomped onto the back porch she lit a lamp and went out and sat with him while he bathed. If the night was chilly she lit a fire in the kitchen and boiled a kettle of water to pour into the tub. Charlie always washed himself with his back turned to her but whenever he turned around he was, without fail, interested. His thing pointed at her like a weather vane. They had both thinned down to gristle and skeleton, and when he climbed on top of her each of them complained about the rough hands and boniness of the other.

Before Charlie went to work on the road crew Plutina had never spent a night alone. She had, in fact, spent precious few nights in a bed by herself. She wasn't particularly scared during the daylight hours because she had so much to do, but she suffered through the nights. She was afraid that when word got out that a young girl stayed by herself in the middle of nowhere men from three counties would line up to rape her. Whenever she dozed off their faces peered in the window. Panthers leapt into her bedroom and landed almost silently on the floor. Ghosts of the old settlers creaked through the rooms. Haints formed in the mist that rose from the creek and floated on the night breeze toward the mountainside. Large animals ran through the woods and the leaves said
shhhhhhhhhh.
The katydids and whip-poor-wills chanted
run away run away run away.
The mountain itself leaned over the house and watched her. When it breathed in it sucked the curtains tight against the window frame. Once Charlie learned how frightened she was he brought home a dog that had been hanging around the work camp, but it was a skulky, mistrustful creature that spent most of the two weeks it stayed there cowering under the house. One morning she tossed a biscuit toward it while it wasn't looking and it took off down the road and never came back. She began sleeping with the head of the ax resting on Charlie's pillow. She kept a butcher knife underneath her side of the mattress, its handle poking out where she could grab it. Charlie's shotgun leaned loaded in the corner, but she was almost as afraid of shooting it as she was of the things she imagined coming through the window.

But she stayed. Word surely got out about the Shires girl who spent the week by herself up App Valley, but nobody came to rape her. She never stopped being afraid, but learned to go to sleep anyway. Over time fewer faces appeared at the window and the panthers stopped coming entirely. She missed one period and then she missed another. Charlie had the week of the Fourth of July off and they laid by the crops. She didn't tell him. When he returned to work she found herself facing the prospect of several weeks with relatively little to do. What surprised her most during the lull was how lonely she was. She tried taking naps after dinner to pass the time but the house was too hot, the air too still. She always wound up crying. She sat on the front steps and stared down the road and imagined someone coming around the bend—a neighbor girl her own age who lived just over the hill and had a lot of fun about her and loved to play games and sing and sit beside her and lean close and whisper about the boys she knew. But when that girl never materialized (Plutina knew that in reality nobody at all lived over that hill or that hill or that hill or that hill almost halfway to Argyle) she dragged herself up to milk the cow and feed Charlie's hateful mule. When she tried singing alone she found her voice too loud for the valley, the mountain too close and too big, the echo it shot back at her sharp as a scold. The nearest church was six miles away but they were Holy Roller Jesus jumpers who spoke in unknown tongues. The nearest Baptist church was all the way in town. Sometimes she got mad at the silence and went into the yard and worked up her courage and made herself holler out of spite. One moonlit night she dreamed she saw her mother walking through the vegetable garden and woke up heartbroken because she hadn't come in to talk. Sometimes she waded in the creek and caught crawdads and looked into their uncomprehending foreign faces and let them go.

The only neighbor near enough to be honestly called one was Mr. William Tolliver, who lived a mile or so beyond the Shires at the end of the road, on the only other farm in the valley. (Beyond Tolliver's place the mountains became impassable to anything other than a creature willing to crawl through the laurel straight up and straight down.) Tolliver was known to everyone who knew him or knew about him as Mr. Tall, because, well, he was. At somewhere north of six and a half feet, he had more than a foot on Charlie. Although Mr. Tall's front door lay within an easy stroll of her own, Plutina had never laid eyes on him, or even his farm. Charlie had told her to never walk in that direction, and she hadn't. Mr. Tall was a hermit. All she knew about him she had learned from storekeepers and the women in the churchyard the few times Charlie had taken her to town. (Oh, people always said, a little startled, when she told them that she lived up App Valley, that's out by Mr. Tall's.)

A long time before, Mr. Tall's young wife and baby daughter had drowned in the gorge. The three of them were on the way to Asheville on the train. A tree had fallen across the track, and while Tolliver and the rest of the men tried to move the tree, the women and children got out to walk around. Mrs. Tolliver walked with the baby toward the river. The baby fell in and Mrs. Tolliver went in after her. The rapids washed both of them up under a rock, where they drowned. Mr. Tall was never quite right again. He came to town less and less and eventually stopped coming entirely. Now everybody said he would shoot you if you set foot on his place. Of course, people also said that he had reasons other than not being right for wanting to be left alone. He had an apple orchard that his ancestors had planted when they came to the valley. People said he used the apples to make brandy. Twice a year Third Scott, who ran a mercantile in Argyle, hauled a load of supplies out to Tolliver's and supposedly hauled a load of apple brandy back to town. (Plutina had seen Scott's wagon go by and knew at least the hauling supplies part of the story to be true. The brandy part people only whispered about.) Nobody else ever saw Mr. Tall. All Third Scott would say about him was, if I was you I wouldn't go up in there.